FutureCoach Sandbox webinar

So I'm going to kick off. This is my very first presentation about this particular topic called the Futures Coach Sandbox, and it has come out of a conversation with a number of people who work with other clients who feel like they need to have some futures insight and access to futures tools but they don't want to go back to university and study, and they also want to be able to pass that on to their clients, but they don't want to add an extra load of work to their clients. So the sandbox is a place where we come to play and share and learn about futures thinking and the tools that we have available to us in a way that is a little bit easier than, than a huge curriculum. So there's a bit of an agenda for today. We're just going to do our, you know, obvious introductions that we're doing here. Then we're going to talk about why we need futures thinking. What, what is it? What does it do for us? What, what is the issue that we're dealing with that means we need futures thinking? What does it look like in practice? How do we integrate it? And then what resources are there available to you? I know that there's a few people on this call who don't know me, so let me introduce myself. My name is Charlotte Kemp. I am a futurist, keynote speaker, and executive coach, and I help leaders to create new thinking for the future, thinking that is fit for the future. And I also help people to negotiate what is happening in their world so that they can aim closer to their preferred future rather than getting stuck in a default future that someone else has created for them. I have done a lot of work in leadership in various associations that I've been involved in, like the professional speaking world, and I write a lot of books and I do presentations like this one where we explore new ideas. I like to think of myself as a professional creative, and on other days I'm a futures philosopher. So why is it then that we even need to be talking about futures thinking? I want to suggest to you that although I'm a professional futurist because I studied and I joined the Association of Professional Futurists and I write books and this is my day job, we are all natural futurists. If you, if you plan for your retirement, if you have planned a holiday where you are going away and maybe you need your passport and you need visas, you've been thinking about the future. You have being a futurist. If you've looked at your career growth, if you've spoken with your children or other people in your family about their future career path and their education, you're a futurist. We're all natural futurists. But how can we become more aware of these futures tools and mindsets? How can we integrate them into our work without making extra pressure? That is part of what this conversation is about. So why do we need futures thinking? And the very first one obviously is the changing landscape that we live in. In the past, it used to be that when there were changes in the world, there was a change and then things slowed down and they stopped and we could kind of like, you know, settle into this new reality. But these days the changes come one after another, unrelenting, and we can't keep up, you know, emotionally, technically, legally, we can't keep up with all of the changes. So let's look at some of them. Technological disruptions. I mean, these are obvious, all the new tools that we have. And during COVID I think a lot of us really escalated that learning curve because we had to now find new ways to communicate and connect. So technological disruptions, for yourself or for your clients, these challenge us to really start facing the future faster. Political upheaval is obvious all over the place. One of the things that I have had conversations with other futurists about is the very strange dichotomy we have in the world of a lot of countries moving more towards right-wing conservative religious kind of identities and ideologies. And at the same time, this growing movement of people who are not wanting to be defined by labels, engaging with the world and community and the land and nature in a different way. And they're touching into that kind of esoteric space, which defies all of the definitions and restrictions on the other side. So we have all of these things happening at the same time, and they have impact on our lives. Even if we aren't in those countries, they still have impact on us. It also obviously indicates these shifting values and norms, things that are changing so dramatically. One of the things that is interesting is when you see older generations, and older generations have done it for eons, looking at younger generations and saying, you know, they're lazy, they don't know what the world is about, They live in their dream world and they don't have values. But younger generations have very strong values that are just different from older generations. So there's these shifting realities and we're not quite sure how to navigate them. And that then adds into increased professional pressure because we have to move faster, we have to do more things, we have to consider more issues. And there's this pressure on people in the business world to perform in a way that they were never prepared to do in the first place. And then obviously for a lot of us, there is this feeling like we need to reinvent. We, we need to be able to clarify who we are and what we're here for and what it means and the work that we want to do and why it's meaningful. And, and we're all trying to reinvent for the reality we're in at the moment, but there's still, you know, a future reality coming. How do we deal with all of these things? So those are the changing landscapes. The next thing we need to consider is that we need to prepare for uncertainty. And maybe in the chat box you can say, give us a yes or no, do you like change? I've introduced my husband ever so briefly, but Richard adores change. He loves change. When he comes into the lounge and something has been moved, he goes, yay! Freedom loves change. Anybody who doesn't like change? Caroline. Okay, good. We've got a really good audience here, people who love change. Okay, you love change that you like, Marie. One of the interesting things about change generally is that when change comes from us, we're ready to embrace it. When change is imposed on us, we're going to resist it. Humans are by nature defiant. We want our own identities and our own space. And so we want to say what change happens to us. We don't want that imposed on us. So there is all of this kind of tension when governments, when legislation, when reality hits us. It's like, this is not what I signed up for. This is not how my life is supposed to go. And in that case, people start looking to try and get more certainty about the future, and they want to know how to predict what is coming next. What does it look like? I'm wondering if our hands are going to stop or if we're going to keep— oh good, otherwise we're going to get dizzy. So, uh, also, your restless soul thrives on change, which is really good. So we like change. But we want to be able to predict the future, especially when those external pressures are on us. One of the things that futurist thinking is often accused of is having a crystal ball and trying to predict the future. And people have a lot of fun when something big happens, and they'll come to futurists and say, you didn't know that this was happening. You know, you're not good at your job. But our job as futurists, your job, is not to predict the future. It's to prepare for the future, and that's why we have these futures tools, is to help us prepare mentally and emotionally for what the future could bring. There are ways of kind of narrowing down what could happen, so we can have this huge array of potential futures, and we can narrow it down, and we can say it's more likely we're going to go in this direction rather than that direction. But but even in that action, even in that exercise, we're preparing our brains for what that looks like. So if we end up in a future that we hadn't anticipated, it's not that jarring, scary thing. It's, well, this wasn't— oh, the new expression is, this wasn't on my 2025 bingo card. And it might not have been on your bingo card, but you're open to framing it as a bingo card. You're open to exploring it because you're not trying to hold on to something that is predictable and defined because you're in a more expansive state. I'm going to assume that the people who would have signed up for this webinar or who might be watching it later on are those kinds of people who are wanting to explore the future, but maybe you're working with clients who are a little bit more uptight because they need things to be defined. And when there's too much change, we, we're going to revert to that state. So when too many things are happening, we're going to go back and say, I just want to know what's happening today, what's happening tomorrow. Can you define it? And obviously there's different personalities and brains and everything else. So we're not predicting, we're preparing. One other thing that we want to really look at in terms of uncertainty about the future is something I call the 3 veils. The first veil is we're preparing ourselves. We're trying to catch up. We're coaching clients who need to be relevant right now for the world that they're in, because if they're not relevant, then they're going to, they're going to lose their job. Um, they're going to get retrenched. They're not going to get enough work or enough clients. So we need to prepare for right now so that we're relevant. The second veil is when we're looking ahead saying, I wonder what's coming next? How do I learn some skills or get some exposure to ideas so that when the next wave comes, I'm ready for it? Anybody who knows those 3 horizons model, that's kind of like first horizon is what we're doing right now. Second horizon is what happens next. This isn't just about the horizons. It's really about kind of piercing the veil of the future. to explore not just what is coming, but what could come. So Veil 1 is now, Veil 2 is what's coming next, and Veil 3 is how do you prepare for something that isn't even on the horizon yet? We, we're not— we can't see it on the landscape. How do we prepare not for the world that is coming, but how do we prepare a world that we want? What are we going to challenge? In terms of values and norms and assumptions? What are we going to challenge in terms of, of how businesses run, how capitalism is run? Is capitalism really the best model, or can we change? So it's really an existential question. It's really defining a world that you would rather see yourself and your children and grandchildren live in than just trying to keep up with the world that is happening right now. So, you know, it's not just making a dent in the world. How do we make a new world? The unknown unknowns. Absolutely. All right. So think about those 3 veils, because especially those of you working with other clients, is sometimes they're coming to you because they got a problem now, or because their, their bosses told them that they need to be prepared for the next, you know, the next season, and we need to work them through that, but still keep their eye further ahead through that 3rd veil so that they they're prepared throughout their lives for what is coming. Not that we can know exactly and, and like have a degree ready for it, but that we have exposure and experience and that our brains are prepared. That's what futures thinking is about. So the third thing is we want to add leveraged value, and I think this is really, really important. So the first thing is this pressure of time. I've taken to calling myself a slow futurist, but everybody is aware of the pressure of time, all the things that need to happen, all the expectations and pressure on us. And what is the kind of impact of artificial intelligence or algorithms or other technologies dealing with that work more efficiently than we're dealing with it? What is our response to that? And I think our response is that we need to learn how to do deep, slow work. We need to know how to do deep work. So there are people who are delighted to brag about how busy their calendars are and, you know, how everything is jam-packed and there's no space to do anything else, and they can't see you for a 25-minute meeting until like 3 weeks' time, and they got so many emails that haven't been read, and we kind of like revel in this busyness. Not us, I don't think. I don't think the people in this room that I know are like that. But we need to find and be intentional about crafting out deep, slow time that we can do other work. So on my calendar, I will block out 2 days at a time and say I'm using that time for thinking and writing and developing a concept or a book or a webinar or something like that. And in those 2 days, I don't put on makeup, I'm not going to talk to anybody, I probably won't answer WhatsApp messages even, because I need the time for my brain to think about these things. You are that valuable that you should be able to carve out that much time for yourself to think deeply about the work that you're doing. That's human work. That's the kind of thing we should be looking at. We also need to for ourselves, for the people we work with, is to take that time to breathe, to slow down, to walk away from the work and allow our brains the freedom to engage with what is around us. Because when modern technology and AI and algorithms make our lives more efficient so that more things can get done in a shorter period of time, our tendency is to fill the new free time with more work. What if we said, great, so now I've saved myself, you know, 3 days' work a month. I'm not going to go and do an extra 3 days' work. I'm not going to go and write an extra book. I'm not going to go and, you know, contact more clients. I'm not going to go and put things into that space. I'm going to take that space and do something else. Walk, spend time with family, breathe, create, talk, do something else with the time. that modern technology allows you to have, because that again is being human, not just— these algorithms and technologies are supposed to serve us. We're not serving them. And the problem is, for those of us engaged with any kind of corporate work, is that every technology that produces efficiencies or saves time means that our KPIs go up the whole time. All the time we're chasing a higher sales target, you know, higher productivity stats, And that serves the machine, that does not serve us. So we want to leverage this, we want to be able to create more deeper, better work with what we have in the future, not just produce more and more of the same shadow work. There's a lovely quote from Archimedes, give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. I don't see him moving much without arms, but it is a really interesting quote. This, uh, we have these levers, we have these tools, we can move the world, but we're not because we're being caught up with, with pace. We cannot match the pace of the world. We cannot embrace the full scope of everything that is available to us, but we can access more. We can access more insight, more people, more learning. That is what we need to be exploring. Okay, what does this look like in practice? I'm going to take you in a moment to an exercise, but first I just want to kind of like set the scene. One of the tools we use in futures thinking is scenarios. And scenarios are so interesting because they give us different pictures, different stories that we can play with. When we go to business school and we learn about business and making plans, whether it's a business plan or a marketing plan or a sales plan, whatever it is, we're looking at strategic planning. We think about all of the variables and we make the strategic plan, and it is one path. It is one way of moving through the world. When we replace the word planning with foresight, then we're starting to do scenarios. This is the plan that— the middle-of-the-road plan that we're looking at, but there could also be a worst-case scenario or a best-case scenario. There could also be the, you know, the dystopian view or the utopian view. There could be various factors that we want to put together and engage and play with, and that's when we're really starting to play with our brains about what the future could look like. That strategic foresight, looking into the future strategically to consider various things. So let's play a little, and I'm going to take us now into whiteboard on Zoom. So bear with me just a moment while I try that. I'm going to have a quick look at the chat before we do that. Slow futurist. Yes. Okay, Freedom, yeah, a 2-day model, that's really cool. And if you can't do it during your work week, you know, find a way to carve out some time during the weekend or, you know, over the space of a month. How do you carve out that time for yourself to really look at the future? Another model we can consider is we know we should be saving our income and investing our income. So saving is short-term, like, you know, for the end of the year, and investment is for our, you know, end of our retirement or a holiday or something significant. And if you just use like the model of 10%, you should be saving 10% of your money. Well, why can't we save 10% of our time and invest it in the future to learn new future skills, to develop our mindset, to experience new ideas, to prepare ourselves for the future? So we need to invest in the future with time. And that's, that's really important. The idea about making work more efficient is not so that we can fit more work in, although that's what capitalism and the current society would have us believe. Absolutely, Sylvester. You articulated it perfectly. There are these assumptions, these automatic things that are kind of like trained into us from when we are young, saying this is the way the world works. And if you think it's any different, you're being naive. You just, you don't know any better. You're a few years and you'll realize how the world is supposed to work. Well, let's not. Let's— if we're doing this work, then let's define a world we actually want, not just keep serving the world that is flawed and the systems that are already there. We want to go beyond that. All right, let's go to the whiteboard. I would love a thumbs up for somebody to tell me that we can see this nicely. Good. Thank you very much. So this is one of those tools that we can use to leverage new ideas. And this is a tool that I'd like to use. I'm just going to turn off some little alerts here. But this is one of the tools I'd like to use when we actually play in the sandbox is that we want to co-create things together. So the future is not one person saying this is how it's going to be. The future is co-created. negotiate. We come together and say, this is what I'm seeing, this is what it looks like, this is what I'm struggling with. I don't want my future to look like that. I'd love it to look like that. And we co-create the future that we're looking at. You'll also hear me say very often, I use the expression futures thinking with an S, and that's because there's not one single future. We've got 28 people in this room. There's 28 futures. even if we're all in the same city together and going about our lives, we're all experiencing the future differently because we're all experiencing this moment, this shared moment. We're looking at it differently. We're looking at it through different lenses of expectation and stuff. So we're in the Future Coach Sandbox, and we're going to look at axes of uncertainty. It's a single tool that I quite like, and I want to play with it a little bit and see if we can co-create something here. So in a moment, I'm going to ask you to give me some ideas. You can put them into the chat box and we'll play with it. So start thinking as we, as we work through this. So here's a— oh, thank you, somebody, for moving my graph around. So here's a particular model that just describes it, axes of uncertainty. So you got 2, you know, 2 different elements that are being intersected and it creates new concepts, new options. So, for example, back when we were looking at, you know, just post-COVID, everybody was sent home and everybody was told it's good to work from home, you can do it. And then once COVID was over, people who wanted— organizations who wanted to control their workforce said, no, working from home is no good at all, you've got to come back to the office. But if we were looking at that, you know, generally people going back to the office, And we were also considering the price of fuel just as an example. I mean, we could have lots of different variables we intersect, but in this case, this would be the conversation a company would be having. So if the fuel price goes up, just going to put a little text box over here. They're really big. Okay, so if the fuel price is going up, but we're working from home, then it's not too much of an impact because we don't have that daily commute to worry about. If the price of fuel goes down, but we're working from home, well, yeah, that's fine. There's no big impact there. If the price of fuel goes down and we're working from the office, well, that's okay because we can afford to go in. But if the price of fuel is going up and we have to go back to the office, then people are going to start rebelling. They're going to start saying, either I need to be paid more, or I need some flexi time, or I'm going to look for another job that honors me and what my family wants. So if a company is looking at how are they going to convince their people to come back to the office and fuel prices are going up at the same time, and that's what's in the headlines, they've got a very different communication strategy than, you know, fuel prices going down and you can stay at home. Then it's not even a conversation. They don't even need to worry about that. So this is one of the ways we can play with uncertainty. Let's look at another example. It's a bit smaller. There we go. All right, so here we're looking at a situation of— and I was just playing around trying to look for some ideas here. I don't do the grocery shopping, but I was in the shops the other day and I saw the price of coffee. And I remember when my particular brand of coffee went up to 80 rand, South African rand, went up to 80 rand a very long time ago. And I remember standing in the shop that day going, how, how are we expected to, to survive when coffee is 80 rand? And I was in the shops recently and I saw the same bottle is 200 rand. I'm so glad I don't do the shopping. Thank you, Richard. I really, really appreciate you. So, so when, when coffee becomes that much more expensive, it could become a luxury. And we're just gonna be playing with ideas here, okay? I'm not, I'm not predicting any terrible thing happening. But, but if coffee becomes a luxury because it is so incredibly expensive, um, then it starts to reframe certain things in our lives. Like if I go out on a coffee date, it is, you know, almost as good as going out on a, you know, an evening date that might have wine involved because coffee is now— I wonder if my date will pay for my coffee because it's really But on the other hand, yes, Sylvester, good for you. On the other hand, maybe we realize how much we need caffeine. So coffee subsidized, and it already is. You see with things like Discovery's Vitality app where they're trying to gamify your, you know, your activities and things like that, you can get this free coffee from certain brands. The gyms will do it. And now even on the Absa banking app. So a bank is saying if you do certain things, you get an opportunity to go and buy yourself, get a voucher for a cup of coffee. So coffee's been subsidized because we need that caffeine to do the work that we want to do or to, you know, face Monday. All apart from Sylvester, who's obviously drinking something a lot healthier than coffee. So either it is coffee's a luxury or coffee becomes subsidized. Now let's intersect that with we need to work harder, harder, faster, more KPIs are going up. We got to deliver, deliver, deliver the whole time, or we get really smart and we realize how we can outsource a lot of the repetitive work we do because we want to do smarter, deeper human work. And the company we're working with or for, they want us to do that good you know, deeper work. So now we've got these 2 intersecting uncertainties, which way is it going to go? What we do next is that we give them some names. So I've got some names over here. When we're looking at coffee becoming a luxury and we've got to work harder, then this quadrant is called the Espresso Treadmill. It's, we've got to work fast and hard, but we get the bonus of having a coffee later on. If coffee is a luxury, but we can work smarter and slower, then we're part of the slow brew society. We, we're elite. We've got our coffee, we've got our deep work, we've got our philosophical conversation, and that's really cool. All right, what we have here, work faster and coffee is subsidized. The company wants you to have coffee because They need you to work harder and faster. And now it's an assembly line. We're just like, we've got to keep moving faster and faster to do that. But if coffee is subsidized, thank you very much, and we can work smarter, then we have a cafe utopia. All the coffee we like, anybody can have coffee, and we're appreciated for the deep work that we do. Once we have those names, we've named those quadrants, we've named those uncertainties. And that is one of the first benefits of futures thinking is putting a name to something that, that we were worried about. Like, you know, what am I going to do if coffee keeps getting more expensive? Well, either I need to, you know, I'm going to be on the espresso treadmill and I'm going to have to, you know, manage that, or I'm going to be part of the slow brew society and I'll be rewarded for it. I'll look important because I can drink my luxury coffee. and I can do slow work. So we start to put names to it, and that's how we manage it. I'm going to give you another example of one that I developed a little while ago. It's down over here. I love this whiteboard tool, which I'm just learning about. So I've written a book, and I'll mention some of the books a little bit later and how you can access them. But these are 2 trends that explain the world today. So The 2 trends that I looked at was scarcity to abundance and binary to fluid. So scarcity to abundance is about resources. Do we have enough resources? Whatever the resource is, it could be time, it could be money, it could be food, it could be, you know, resources in the workplace, it could be marketing resources. Whatever it is, we either have a scarcity or we have an abundance of it. Now, I'm sure we're gonna see some comments coming up here, but scarcity is often intentionally— the concept is created as a marketing tool. When I first put this document, this concept together, and I was sharing it with some colleagues on LinkedIn, I had a Nigerian colleague replied to me and he was quite annoyed. We had a very interesting exchange. He wanted to educate me on this and I was happy to be educated. It was in fact my point, but I was quite happy for him to tell me from his perspective. But he said, here in Africa, we never had scarcity until the colonials came and imposed it on us. And when they brought capitalism and imposed it on Africa, we were told that we had nothing, that Africa is poor country, a nation. I apologize. Africa is a poor continent made up of many different countries. But that scarcity mindset was imposed on us so that value could be extracted out of this continent and sent elsewhere. We have an abundance in Africa. We have an abundance of everything. We have enough of everything for everyone. around the world, except that the economic systems and political systems and crime pulls some of that access away and restricts access to those resources. And that's where we get the scarcity from, because it's been restricted from us, not that there isn't enough to start with. So once we start looking at that, it creates a whole lot of really interesting concepts. And then the binary to fluid is about identity. Binary is yes, no, right, wrong, black, white, up, down, that, you know, whatever it is, there's an opposite to it. Whereas fluid is we can embrace this, we can look at different things. There are different ways of expressing. There's 50 shades of purple. There's different ways of being. We're not just one thing. We're not just one identity. A lot of us in the space who are coaches and speakers and trainers, like, you've got a niche, you've got to be an expert in one thing. But there's a lot of really creative ADHD neurodiverse people in the space, and they're going, there are so many ideas, I can't be just one thing. And I, I am one person who is many things and many different expressions, so we can play around with that. So I intersected those 2 2 concepts, and we've come up with 4 names, which is really interesting. So binary scarcity is structured shortfalls, you know, very restricted. This is how it is, and somebody's in control of who has access. Scarcity but fluid— this is the uncharted edge. When there's binary and abundance, there's a predictable plenty. Like, we can predict this because we know that, you know, binary, it's yes, no, right, wrong, full, empty, but there is an abundance of things. But down here in the, the fluid abundance quadrant, we have the everflow, and the everflow is the space to create, the space to explore, the space to create a preferred future. So I've taken those 2 uncertainties and intersected them, and we've come up with that. I'd love now to see if there are any ideas, and we've got a blank graph over here. Let's see if anybody wants to share some quadrants some uncertainties that you might want to explore. I'm just going to move my chat box over here. Thanks, Sylvester. No judgment to coffee drinkers. Manufactured scarcity, planned obsolescence. Very good example. All right, so let's see, is there something that you want to explore, an uncertainty? And let's find some random ones that we can look at. Future business career planning. All right, what would be the uncertainty? Like, Your business is going to fail, or your business is going to succeed wildly. But what is the impact of AI on business? Let's see if there's any others. I'm gonna take AI. It's my little text box over here. Oopsie. Come on. Text box. AI, helpful impact. And AI down here, just it's there, but it's unhelpful. We know we can do things, but it's not actually producing the results we want. It's far too easy to tell when somebody's used AI. The results are not accurate. We have to double-check everything because it's a little bit suspicious. All right, Freedom suggested positioning yourself. So let's try copy that and say that we are— we're unknown. People don't know who we are, or we are becoming well-known and recognized for the work that we're doing. Okay, now I've given myself a challenge because now we've got to try and work out what that intersection looks like. So let's look at— and you'll see now because how I'm looking at these quadrants means that the bottom right-hand corner is not always the best option. If AI is helpful and we're recognized, what does that mean for our business? If we're unknown and AI is unhelpful, what does that mean for our business? So anybody want to suggest a name? So we're looking here in this quadrant to do that, make a big X. So what might we call this quadrant when we are unknown and we think that we can play with AI and AI is going to make us famous and make us lots of money? What does it look like? What are the characteristics of a person in this space? So the person is unknown. People don't know what they can do and what their skills are. Maybe they're not even clear what their skills are yet, that they're not positioned, and they want to play with AI, but they keep going onto AI and doing things, and they get different results and strange answers and bad advice. What does that look like? Per the dot AI, I'm not quite sure what that means. Xbot blind leading the blind. Oh, that's good, Caroline. So let's call it because what we have here is an unintelligent artificial intelligence that is leading a person who. Who doesn't realize that they don't know anything. That happens a lot, you know, for those of us who've been around in various spaces like coaching spaces or, um, speaking or training, we're aware of our growth, um, and, and we've learned all these things. We've been intentional about learning new ideas, and now we're sitting there going, this is obvious, surely everybody knows that. And then you encounter somebody who says something, you go, oh, this person knows nothing, um, What are they thinking? That's never going to work. And ethically, you can't just go and poke your nose in other people's business the whole time. But if this is a client coming to you saying, please coach me because I've been using AI and AI suggests I do all these things and I've been doing all this stuff and it hasn't worked, it's because they're blind to understanding what the world should look like and they're using AI without skill and they're not making any progress. All right. .com, .com. Okay, so let's look now. AI is unhelpful, but we are recognized. What, what might we call this quadrant? A great example of our times. Yes. So we recognize we're trying to use AI, but it's not helpful. It's not giving us any results. What could we call this quadrant? And I'm not sure that that's future is perfect yet. I think that might be up in the top right-hand corner, because in this case we're looking at unhelpful AI. So we got a person who's recognized, they're smart, people know what they're doing. Yeah, it should be up there in the top right. Which one? Recognized and unhelpful. Yes. Yeah. So that's right. Bottom right. Bottom right. Yeah. Okay, thank you. And back, which is perfect. Good. So this one, artificial stupidity, that's good. Information overload, yes. Yeah, drinking from a fire hydrant, because that's part of the problem with the future is that everything is available to you. How on earth are you supposed to narrow it down to one thing or the next thing? Because there's just so much. Um, and if you got a neurodiverse brain, that's really, really tough. Willful ignorance. That's good. That's good. Um, okay, with that, I was thinking the worst thing about doing this in public is having to spell in front of people. Um, spinning wheels. That's what I was thinking of, is that the person is, is recognized. They're wanting to make progress in their business and they're using AI, but they don't know how to use AI properly. And the results that they're getting are poor. They're just They're just not making any progress, which is really frustrating. Let's go up into this quadrant. So right here, so we got helpful AI and an unknown, a person who's not positioned. What could that be? Hit the road. Yeah. Okay. I'm also thinking that it could be the start of something. So yeah, maybe that hit the road is a good idea. This is a person who has ambitions to become recognized, has ambitions to have a good business and a good pardon me, a good name, and they're using AI skillfully, and AI is giving them good helpful advice. So that they really need to start moving forward. They have a plan to follow, and hopefully they can follow this road and get onto the right-hand side. And then doorstop. Okay. All right. And then Anne's suggestion here, the future is perfect. So now you've got AI, you recognize, and you're using it to enhance the work that you're doing make progress. So thank you for participating in this exercise, and this is the idea of this kind of a tool is that we sit down and we play with ideas. You've got a client who comes to you who says, I've been using artificial intelligence, I want to improve my positioning, I want to have more success in my business, and you play around with this and they suddenly go, oh my goodness, you're right, I'm actually not as famous as I thought I was. You know, uh, was it like famous in their own lunch hour or something? Um, so I'm not as famous as I, as I want. I'm not positioned well enough. People outside of the country don't know who I am. Um, so I need to develop that. And, and I've been using AI all wrong. Um, you know, that's why I'm not making the progress. So you can coach them into recognizing them this and then saying, for example, it might be that the person says, I'm unknown, but I want to become recognized, but I know how to use AI well to help me with that, not to replace us humans and experts, but, but to help them with some practical, you know, tactics and things. Or it could be that the person is recognized and they say, oh wait, I see I'm not making progress because I'm following what AI is suggesting I should do, but I'm not getting good results out of it. And, and that's why I'm spinning my wheels. Um, and, and until somebody interrupts this, it is that willful ignorance. Like, I'm quite happy sitting here just doing my own thing and sulking until there's an intervention, and then we can go and look at this, this space. Now we're, we're being coached, we've got a path, and we know how to use our tools properly. Um, yes, please do take a pic if you want to. That's absolutely fine, and I will share some of this with you afterwards as well. Okay, so if we're finished with that, I'm going to, I'm going to close off the screen. Oh wait, there was something else I wanted to show you. Once we have created a, a set of axes here and we've named them and we're looking at them, what we can then do is look at each of those quadrants and we can start to highlight and name some flags. So the red flags are the price of sugar is going up, the price of chocolate is going up, the price of coffee is going up. We're getting into a place where things are getting more expensive. Those are red flags. So even before you see the coffee price go up, you see other prices go up and you realize that this is going to be more of a luxury item in the future. When the boss starts putting pressure on and saying, you know, you need to be in the office on time and, you know, we've got a productivity expert coming in to look at our processes, these are red flags for your you're going to have to produce better productivity stats because statistics are more important than the quality of deep work you can do. That's a red flag. When your boss comes to you and says, let's have a conversation about where you want to be in the world and the contribution you want to make to the planet, that's a green flag for I'm gonna get to do real deep meaningful work, human work. That's a green flag. So you can start to, even with this one, you can start to identify some red flags and green flags. And the idea of naming those flags, it's like the whole Harry Potter thing, like, uh, he who must not be named. The more we don't name the thing, the bigger it looms over us. You give it a name, you take away some of its mystery. That's why Rumpelstiltskin didn't want anybody to know his name because they'd have power over him. You never tell a fairy your name. because it gives them power. So once we name those unknown things, we got the power over them. We know what this thing is. It's not an uncertainty. It's a potential future, and we don't want it, or we do want it. And now we can start to identify the flags that will indicate which direction we're going in so we can course correct, or so that we can, you know, call a meeting and say, this is not where we want to go. What are we going to do to change? And then there's futures tools that we can use to, to make that, that very specific intentional shift into a different direction. Okay, thank you very much for sharing this with me. I'm going to just go back to the presentation and just kind of wrap up a little bit here. So what we're trying to do with, with the, with the toolbox is to explore some ideas without creating extra work, to use curiosity to play with the future instead of anxiety, to play with language. I worked with a client recently who's got an incredible strat document, strategic document at the highest level of this organization, but it's so full of jargon. So we played with a metaphor that I have of using a map of time and a compass and a guide, and we played with this map with these silly names, and then we put it into regular language, and then we looked back at the strategic document and said, that's what that is. And it was just people's, like, lights were going on. It was beautiful to look at. When we use these futures tools, we can enrich conversations where we're not just saying, oh, things are going bad, things are going south, things are like nothing's will it ever get any better? Instead of just being in that negative loop, we can actually enrich our conversation by saying, hmm, I wonder if we could do things differently. What would that look like? What would we call that? Benefits of this futures thinking: we unlock our creativity by exploring potential futures. Our minds are open to different things, not just trying very, very hard to move faster to make this this flawed system work? What about a different system altogether? We gently nurture resilience, and you're going to see me talk a lot about this. Like, we're doing this gently. We're not putting on extra work, no extra pressure, because for goodness sake, we've got all the tools we need. We don't need to keep putting pressure on each other. Let's have a little bit of grace and evolve into something that is, is, is deeper and more meaningful. And we also unlock— we're going backwards here. We also unlock a perspective on patterns because we can't predict the future, but brains, human brains are designed to look for patterns. And if we can identify potential patterns, then we get a perspective on what different futures could unfold. And that's what futures thinking brings to us and how it integrates into the work that we're all doing. So I want to just finish off and let you know about some resources because part of this is, like I'm saying, we have everything we need, we just don't always have access to it. So first of all, I love writing and exploring different ideas and concepts, so I have a number of books online and I'm going to pop into the chat box in a moment some of those links so you can find those books. There's also a dictionary, there's going to be a book coming out soon that is all about the tools that we, um, the tools and models, some of the things that I've spoken about today. And you can find those on Amazon, and you can find them on, um, the other online platforms, and some on my website as well. Then there's also, oh gosh, the Futures Alchemy Collaborative. And what this is, is that you can join for free and just go in there and see. There's, I put a lot of, um, kind philosophical musings, like an idea that I have, and I just create a short video and I pop it in there. I share some of the, uh, documents and content that I create, but there's also a coaching program there, and it's based over 3 months. And it starts with the very first level is putting your— getting your mindset right, your futures mindset, then learning how to use the futures tools, and then up at the top it's developing your skill set. Um, and at $15 a month you can access any of the books that I've published, and that work, that first month of the workbook of Futures Coaching. And then there is the Sandbox, which is what I'd like to invite you all to. The Sandbox is, it's a place where we're going to play like we have today, and it'll be like regular people at regular sessions where people will come together. We'll have a video that we share up front, so somebody can— we can learn the new tool that we're exploring and kind of get familiar with the language. And then we'll come together in a session and we'll play on a whiteboard and we will play with some novel ideas and fun ideas just to make that model make sense to us. And then we will explore how to research that model or use that model in the wild, you know, in real life, and what kind of results will it get. So it's a very collaborative space where we're going to work together and share ideas. It is a membership program, and I've made it as affordable as I possibly can because, because I want people to have access to this kind of content. But this is something where we participate. It's not a huge workload. There's like, we're not learning a degree here, but we'll have simple access to real tools that can create real results. That is Thanks, Vladimir. The— there's a quarterly fee and there's an annual fee. The quarterly fee for the next 3 months, for the rest of this year, is just discounted to R297. That's South African rand, and if you're elsewhere, you can do a currency conversion and see what it is in other currencies. So the sandbox where futures comes to play, it's a place where we're going to learn and share and co-create. And once we've worked out how those models work, how do we use them in real life with our clients to actually make a difference? Because that's the future that we're trying to create. It's not, it's not the default future that everybody else has, but something that we prefer, something that we're quite intentional about. And we only do that if we have developed our thinking fit for the future. Folks, friends, and colleagues, thank you very much for sharing this time with me and for engaging with that, that exercise. Thanks, Lisha. And I will be sharing some of this in an email later on today and a recording as well. But if you have any questions, please be in touch and let me know if this helped you in the work that you're doing with your clients and in your own career. Thank you, Eugenie. Thanks, everybody.